Door opening help

For those who are seeking prosthetic limbs, or just require a little bit of robotic gripper help, the choices are very few and very costly. A newcomer to the area is hoping to change the costly part with their door opening arm. Costing only $2,000 to build, it is quite cheap compared to the other offerings. This arm can grip, twist, and swing its arm at the same time using a single motor thanks to a slip clutch.

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21 thoughts on “Door opening help”

still no reason why it should cost $2000 and the assumption thats a great deal is ridiculous. i really wish people building this stuff would lose a limb and then some slime ball would offer them assistance for thousands of dollars on top of their medical bills.

Two grand? There’s no way that’s more than a hundred in materials even if you made it with some nice light titanium alloy. Even if you made just one with no custom tooling at all using standard equipment like a milling machine and a lathe there’s no way it would come out to anything near two grand. And if you were to make custom jigs and fixtures for mass production forget about it, say maybe fifty bucks a pop if you want a bit of having fun money for the weekend?

All inventions start out with a high price tag but come down after stream lining. How much did the first prosthetic foot cost? This looks to me like something else to add to the ever growing Swiss Army Knife of aids to help the handicap.

the upright wheelchair, i think your referring to is the IBOT. I think it cost over $30,000 us.
there are many people that have cervical injuries, where the use of their arm and hand muscles are either non existent compromised.
SO an IBOT still wont open doors.
The first problem i see with this design is , if the person is using a wheelchair, they do not fit through the old size, non ADA door.
The 2000 price tag is ridiculous, as is the price on all of this type of stuff.
A typical wheel chair, the ones that someone would use to try and live a normal life cost around $10,000. They are made to break down quick so that the users can transfer into a car, beak down the chair and put it in the backseat. only those with enough upper body use and strength can do this.

Quantitatively, what kind of torque would something like this have to apply to turn handles/knobs? Any tips motor selection for accomplishing tasks that require fairly significant amounts of torque (well…compared to the things we see in smaller electronics)?

If you can do it so much cheaper, please do. As for replacing all your door knobs, the point is to enable people to go more places. You may not have an issue at the store, but offices, hotels, and other people’s homes may not be as user friendly. The “crash bar” works on the way out, but how do you get in? not every one of those is on an unlatched door like at the mall.

if you want to price anything specific to disability then start at the price it is worth and add a 0 on the end. Wheelchairs that are really a modded pram $12,000, bath chairs made from PVC tubing and “shade cloth” $500… so it would seem $2000 is par for the course …shittingly so }-(

I have Osteogenesis Imperfecta Type I & II and I have faced this pricing situation my whole life. It’s actually offensive and feels like no one gives a shit about your disability just so you remain disabled and needing equipment.